The use of bleeding by leeches in government
You know what? I don't want to hear another politician, pundit, so-called patriot, or priest claim that America is based on Christian values or principles. They keep saying this, and they say it offhandedly as if it's self-evidemt, and they say it indignantly when that pesky separation between Church and State is bumped into.

But this is bullshit, complete and utter. Although many of the people involved when the nation was first formed were Christian, if only by cultural tradition, one of the main points of coming here was to escape persecution and to enjoy freedom of religion. Granted, they wanted freedom for their religion, but as more sects of Christians (and other faiths) showed up here, the notion of that freedom broadened.

So my first answer to these people is this: The only way one can have freedom of religion is to have a government that is completely devoid of religious leanings.

But there's more... America is one of the few nations in the world not based on happenstance and history. Take Britain, for instance. It's a free Western nation, but that's mostly a messy mishmash of history and tradition that was eventually steered into that state. Not to insult the British, since that struggle was not trivial. But, Britain's been a country for a long, long time. There are wings of universities in Britain which are older than America as a country. America, on the other hand, was started from the beginning in a new land (to us, anyway), based almost entirely on philosophical principles. We started from scratch. I'm not ignoring the fact that that meant wiping clean much of the land with the blood of the people already living here, but that's a story for another time.

Since this country is based on principles, we have a foundation that is very nearly as precise as laws can get. Other countries are based on traditions and norms and culture, but we're based on solid ideas that are both timeless and ancient. No matter where our culture goes, as long as we maintain these truths to be self-evident, we still have a guiding compass from which every other good law grows.

What am I getting at? Well, these principles are found nowhere in the Holy Bible or any other religious text. Show me the pages in the Bible that show where God commanded us to have and give freedoms and rights of speech, movement, assembly, due process, and representation. You won't find it. These are man-made ideas, arrived at by painstaking processes of debate and thought over centuries, all the way back to Aristotle (who predates the Bible itself).

The claim is made sometimes, when one reads America's early documents, that the Founding Fathers used phrases like "created equal". This is pointed at with a "See?! See?! They were all good Christians!" fervor. The problem is, really, that this was just the language of the times. There was no such concept as the Theory of Evolution yet, the Origin of the Species had not been written yet, and Charles Darwin had yet to be born. Modern hindsight is 20/20, but those times were very different than now. I fully believe that, had these ideas and language been available at the time, the Founding Fathers would have used them instead of the common Christian-laced phrases they had available to them. But, a similarity in phraseology does not mean the principles are the same.

What you will find in the Bible, and in any other religion, is poetry, mythology, cosmology, inspiration, and moral stories. These are needed, and help one find one's place in the universe. Even atheists have these, though theirs are rooted in purely secular and logical grounds. The problem, though, is when one tries to take all of this literally. Like when one tries to build laws and nations on them.

Take the Taliban, for instance. The Taliban is a government based on ideas too, believe it or not. In that, they are similar to America. They have tried starting a nation from scratch in Afghanistan, but based on interpretations of the religion and traditions of Islam, rather than on man-made principles rooted in logic and experience. And although I say America's founding principles are man-made, which regime appears more artificial and arbitrary?

The problem is, religion is not meant for the logical brain. And it's the logical brain that's most needed in law making and nation building. These activities require precision and exhaustive definition. This calls for logic and exact denotative language. We shudder and laugh at "lawyerese" as another, absurd language-- but it is in fact another language, and is one that is an attempt to be as precise in the realm of governing human affairs as science is in describing physical laws.

Religious language is the exact opposite of Lawyerese. Religious language is illogical, often intentionally contrary and paradoxical. It is connotative and imprecise. It is meant to be this way because it's supposed to deliver its memetic payloads straight into your lower brain layers, past the cerebral cortex. It induces emotion, thrall, and ecstasy. It gives hope, and it can help ease passage through the world. But it's not appropriate, whatsoever, for defining standards and directives for maintaining a free and open society.

I should look them up again so I can back this up, but I once made a list of Biblical citations. This list contained advice on how to treat one's slaves; how to best be firm in subjugating one's wife; how best to serve one's earthy King... one could also probably find opposites to all the above with those pages, as well. And that's the problem. It's equivocal. It's been said that the Devil can quote scripture to support his own cause, and it's true. This is not material fit for creating a just, fair, and consistent society.

So, when I hear an American proclaim or intone that this country is based on Christianity, I want to send them to the theocracies of the Middle East and throughout history in the world and show them just what nations based on religion really look like. I want to make them spend an afternoon with a self-righteous fuck like Jerry Farwell-- oh wait, some of them probably already do. I want to ask them if they want the position of Minister for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue when it becomes available in the US government.

See, they mean well. Christianity can promote some positive virtues, like tolerance and good will. But it can, like ALL religion, be pretty damn ugly, too. But, back when people still used leeches to cure all ills, they meant well too. They just didn't know. But intentions don't help a thing when you take the wrong path to reach them.

We've long since outgrown the use of leeches in medicine. When will we outgrow the use of religion in government?